Born in Massachusetts in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop grew up in New England and Nova Scotia. She graduated from Vassar College in 1934. As a student at Vassar, she worked on the student newspaper and founded a literary magazine. Bishop went on to travel through Europe, and she lived in New York, in Florida, and, for 16 years, in Brazil. During her lifetime, she published only five volumes of poetry—four of them winning major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955. Bishop's poetry has long been admired for its pure and precise examination of details in different corners of the world. In addition to writing poetry, Bishop translated a famous Brazilian diary, The Diary of Helena Morley, wrote stories for The New Yorker, and taught at several important universities before her death in 1979.

Larry Woiwode was born in a small town in North Dakota in 1942. By the mid-1960s, he was living in New York City and publishing stories and poetry in The New Yorker. Today, Woiwode is the author of numerous novels and has published fiction and poetry in The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper's and The Paris Review. In 1978, Woiwode, his wife, and his four children moved back to North Dakota to a 160-acre farm. In 1995, he was named poet laureate of North Dakota, and he received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for distinction in the art of the short story.